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National Narrative Against Terrorism دہشت گردی کے خلاف قومی بیانیہ تاریخی فتویٰ ’’پیغام پاکستان‘‘ تمام مسالک ک...

Showing posts with label Ignorance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ignorance. Show all posts

Thursday, December 5, 2019

جہالت اور ترقی Ignorance and Progress

Ignorance, Progress & Muslims

Sadly, we are just not prepared to face reality. The reason Muslims have been left so far behind is their refusal to embrace modern education, and to cling to rote learning and dogma. By confusing Western thought and influence with rationality, we think we are better Muslims by rejecting modernity. As a prime example of this, consider the Ottoman refusal to install printing presses when they were first invented. The reason given was that this would result in the mass production of holy texts by machines instead of being calligraphed. Keep reading >>>>
http://dunya.com.pk/news/authors/detail_image/x3977_73321083.jpg.pagespeed.ic.a3yQHzY9NE.jpg

Monday, July 1, 2013

The Ostrich شتر مرغ

http://dunya.com.pk/index.php/author/muhammad-izhar-ul-haq/2013-07-01/3446/69326508#.UdE9hDssUwI

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Attack on Malala Yousufzai by Takfiri Taliban and educating girls

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=363385143749640
ملالہ یوسف زئی پر حملہ غیراسلامی اور غیر شرعی فعل ہے، علماء کا فتویٰ
لاہور … سنی اتحاد کونسل کے 50 سے زائد مفتیان کرام نے فتویٰ دیاہے کہ ملالہ یوسف زئی پر حملہ غیر اسلامی اور غیر شرعی فعل ہے، حملہ کرنے والوں کی خود ساختہ تعبیر اسلام ، شریعت سے متصادم ہے اور حملہ کرنے والے دہشت گردوں کا فہمِ اسلام گمراہی اور جہالت پر مبنی ہے۔ لاہور سے جاری فتویٰ میں کہا گیا ہے کہ اسلام عورتوں کو تعلیم سے منع نہیں کرتا، بلکہ ہر مرد اور عورت کیلئے دین اور دنیا کا علم حاصل کرنا لازمی قرار دیا ہے۔ مفتیانِ کرام کا کہنا ہے کہ نبی کریم ﷺ نے ایک مومن مسلمان کی جان اور مال کی حرمت کو کعبہ کی حرمت سے زیادہ اہم قرار دیا، اسلام ایک بے گناہ کے قتل کو ساری انسانیت کے قتل کے مترادف قرار دیتا ہے۔ انہوں نے قرار دیا کہ امریکا کے ساتھ تعاون بھی غیر اسلامی عمل ہے اور دہشت گردی کی ہر کارروائی قبول کرلینے والے دراصل امریکا کے تنخواہ دار ایجنٹ ہیں۔ مفتیان نے قوم سے اپیل کی کہ اسلام کا صحیح فلسفہ دنیا کے سامنے پیش کریں تاکہ اسلام، مسلمانوں، داڑھی اور پگڑی کو بدنام ہونے سے بچایا جا سکے ۔
Read: Illogical Logic غیر منطقی منطق of Takfiri Taliban to kill innocent people in Pakistan- Refuted

Today, Pakistan is in an uproar over the targeted shooting of 14-year-old Malala Yousufzai by the Taliban. The Taliban, quick to claim responsibility for the attack, called her advocacy for the education of children, and particularly that of girls, in Swat an “obscenity”, warning the rest of Pakistan to not follow in her footsteps: “let this be a lesson”. With this tragic incident, Pakistan is at a crossroads in the war for its future. The two paths in front of the country are clear. It can tumble down the route of Afghanistan or take the long and uphill route to becoming a relatively peaceful and prosperous country.
Facing the Taliban takeover of Swat in 2009, 11-year-old Malala took on her shoulders the responsibility of a country and did what the Pakistani government did not have the courage to do — she stood up for her basic human rights. Today, as she fights for her life on a hospital bed in Peshawar, pictures of her heartbreakingly innocent face cover the pages of newspapers and the screens of social and news media across Pakistan, finally uniting a country against its real enemy: the Taliban. The Pakistani government, military and opposition parties are, in a rare show of unity, unequivocally denouncing the attack, for once on the same page as the civil society, which has also forcefully and bravely stepped out into the streets.
This public outrage offers a glimmer of hope. Pakistan has taken a tiny step on the difficult path towards reclaiming its identity as a moderate country. In the short term, the government needs to step up and seize the opportunity in front of it and finally take decisive action against the Taliban. Hunt down Malala’s attackers and the perpetrators of countless previous atrocities, try them quickly and if they are convicted, ensure they never see the light of day again. It will take a combined effort by the government, the judiciary, the police and the military, all of whom will have to get past their fractious history — a very tall order by any stretch. But there is nothing more important — the very existence of Pakistan and the basic human rights of its citizens are at stake. However, this is a short-term fix.
The long-term solution to rooting out radicalisation and militancy lies in the very thing which so threatens the Taliban: girls’ education. While a great deal of empirical evidence from around the world demonstrates that investments in female education give huge dividends in terms of economic, educational and health advancements, my recent research establishes that the education of girls also makes them less supportive of terrorism and militancy. Specifically, I used data from a recent, large-scale public opinion survey in Pakistan to show that while uneducated women exhibit higher support for militancy relative to uneducated men, educated women show much lower support for militancy relative to educated men. 
Imagine a society where women are unable to deliver their babies in hospitals because the only on-call doctor is male, or a society where any girl emerging from the house to study or any women going to work is under threat. This was Afghanistan under Taliban rule. The good news is that Pakistan is not there — yet. That it took an attempted murder of a courageous girl and the brazenness of the Taliban’s public proclamations threatening her life again, to shake us out of our complacency is appalling. 
This attack was not about drones and it was not about Islam. This is about a struggle for power and control by the Taliban and an effort to remove any traces of productive participation by women in society. Just as the Taliban scare us with terror, we must scare them by making them unable to operate. The threat of persecution may not serve as a deterrent to the crazed suicide bomber variety of militants, but it will deter many elements within the Taliban and it will importantly deter future militant recruits. We must terrorise them by investing more than ever before in educating girls.
The Taliban know that they lie on the fringes of society, given that even the militant Jamaatud Dawa publicly opposed the attack on Malala. This tragedy reeks of their desperation, not their strength. Let this event be a lesson to the Taliban and be their end.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 12th, 2012.

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Ignorance is Curse

“.. Are the knowledgeable and the ignorant equal? In fact, none will take heed except the people of understanding.”(Qur’an;39:9).

Ignorance is the curse which leads to darkness and destruction. This was realised by Plato, 2400 years ago. ‘The ‘Allegory of the Cave’, also known as ‘The Cave Analogy‘, ‘Plato’s Cave’ or the ‘Parable of the Cave’, is an allegory used by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work The Republic to illustrate “our nature in its education and want of education”.  The Allegory of the Cave is presented after themetaphor of the sun and the analogy of the divided line . Socrates describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Socrates, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.
This is illustrated in following videos:

Brief
Socrates begins by describing a scenario in which what people take to be real would in fact be an illusion. He asks Glaucon to imagine acave inhabited by prisoners who have been chained and held immobile since childhood: not only are their arms and legs held in place, but their heads are also fixed, compelled to gaze at a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which people walk carrying things on their heads “including figures of men and animals made of wood, stone and other materials”. The prisoners watch the shadows cast by the men, not knowing they are shadows. There are also echoes off the wall from the noise produced from the walkway.
Socrates suggests the prisoners would take the shadows to be real things and the echoes to be real sounds, not just reflections of reality, since they are all they had ever seen or heard. They would praise as clever whoever could best guess which shadow would come next, as someone who understood the nature of the world, and the whole of their society would depend on the shadows on the wall.

Release from the cave: Socrates next introduces something new to this scenario. Suppose that a prisoner is freed and permitted to stand up. If someone were to show him the things that had cast the shadows, he would not recognize them for what they were and could not name them; he would believe the shadows on the wall to be more real than what he sees. “Suppose further,” Socrates says, “that the man was compelled to look at the fire: wouldn’t he be struck blind and try to turn his gaze back toward the shadows, as toward what he can see clearly and hold to be real? What if someone forcibly dragged such a man upward, out of the cave: wouldn’t the man be angry at the one doing this to him? And if dragged all the way out into the sunlight, wouldn’t he be distressed and unable to see “even one of the things now said to be true,” viz. the shadows on the wall?

After some time on the surface, however, Socrates suggests that the freed prisoner would acclimate. He would see more and more things around him, until he could look upon the Sun. He would understand that the Sun is the “source of the seasons and the years, and is the steward of all things in the visible place, and is in a certain way the cause of all those things he and his companions had been seeing”.

Return to the cave:Socrates next asks Glaucon to consider the condition of  this man. “Wouldn’t he remember his first home, what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners, and consider himself happy and them pitiable? And wouldn’t he disdain whatever honors, praises, and prizes were awarded there to the ones who guessed best which shadows followed which? Moreover, were he to return there, wouldn’t he be rather bad at their game, no longer being accustomed to the darkness? “Wouldn’t it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it’s not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up, wouldn’t they kill him?”

Remarks on the allegory: Socrates remarks that this allegory can be taken with what was said before, viz. the metaphor of the Sun, and the divided line. In particular, he likens

“the region revealed through sight” – the ordinary objects we see around us – “to the prison home, and the light of the fire in it to the power of the Sun. And in applying the going up and the seeing of what’s above to the soul’s journey to the intelligible place, you not mistake my expectation, since you desire to hear it. A god doubtless knows if it happens to be true. At all events, this is the way the phenomena look to me: in the region of the knowable the last thing to be seen, and that with considerable effort, is the idea of good; but once seen, it must be concluded that this is indeed the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful – in the visible realm it gives birth to light and its sovereign; in the intelligible realm, itself sovereign, it provided truth and intelligence – and that the man who is going to act prudently in private or in public must see it”.
After “returning from divine contemplations to human evils”, a man “is graceless and looks quite ridiculous when – with his sight still dim and before he has gotten sufficiently accustomed to the surrounding darkness – he is compelled in courtrooms or elsewhere to contend about the shadows of justice or the representations of which they are the shadows, and to dispute about the way these things are understood by men who have never seen justice itself?” [Courtesy/Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato's_Cave]

Conclusion:
God loves His creation, He has been selecting prophets among the ignorant people for their guidance. He enlightened the prophets with the light of His knowledge. Some are Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus Christ  and Muhammad [peace be upon them all]. Some people listened to them while others mocked them,  even  tried to kill some prophets. Some people followed the prophets, but the scholars responsible for it,  altered the message after prophets were gone. Finally God delivered His final message, Qura'n through last prophet, God took responsibility upon Himself for its protection. Its a matter of choice for humanity to remain ignorant, live in the darkness like ‘prisoners of the cave’ or listen and follow the last message of guidance for salvation, still available in original revealed form! Unfortunately some Muslims ignore the clear instructions of Qura'n, kill innocent people called Takfiri Taliban, they need to study Qura'n to comprehend the message clearly. The triliteral root ʿayn lām mīm (ع ل م) occurs 854 times in the Quran, in 14 derived forms, if exclude 73 times as the noun ʿālamīn (عَٰلَمِين) for World/Worlds, at remaining 781 places it is used in the meanings of  'Knowledge Know, teach, taught, learn & for God as 'All Knower, All Knowing'.
Read More:
  1. Learning & Science
  2. http://quran-pedia.blogspot.com
  3.  Universe, Science & God
  4.  Faith & Reason
  5. Humanism or Atheism
  6. Islam & Philosophy
  7. Metaphysics: Al-Ghaib